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2.5/5

The first Guo I read, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, was a work I greatly resonated with due to its no-nonsense portrayal of my own age group in a setting that is customarily choked to the gills with sensationalist communisms and related matters. Certain parts of this book provide more of the same, but on the whole, the subject material is far more extreme in temper than that collegial misanthrope of a tome, so I was less of an engaged participant and more a distanced observer this time around. I better appreciated the structuring of the entirety by the ending, but as suggested by Lessing's blurb (some very surprising authors reviewing other authors lately: Mantel for Ogawa, Lessing for Guo; I suppose I should be glad more established Anglo woman authors are vouching for their women in translation comrades) on my copy's back cover, this is a modern fairy tale in tone, and unfortunately similarly cardboard cutout in characters, plot points, and trauma instances. I would like to read more Guo, but none of her more popular works that come to mind appeal on surface level, and honestly, I'm craving something a tad more chaotic than what Guo's sometimes straightforward narration can give me. As such, not the most triumphant return to a promising author, but Guo is still rather young, so I can afford to look forward to future works of hers that haven't yet calcified in their reputation.

I've been celebrating Women in Translation Month for the past few weeks, and that has meant delving into the small but still sustainable collection of relevant reading and exploring authors both new and old in the vein of the as of yet unread works. Guo is one of the ones who I've been meaning to return to for a few years, but while I'm holding out on reading more of her works, this work was on par with Ogawa's work that I recently completed, an author that I've decided to take a break from in a manner that may turn out permanent. The scenarios rendered by the two authors are very different, but I felt there was too much reliance on certain themes of menace along certain disgustingly familiar predator and prey dynamics, so I was less horrified by VoS' protagonist's horrifying childhood experiences and more exhausted by watching something I had seem before and will likely be forced to watch for some time coming in popular media. Not the most compassionate thing to say, but so to as it's not the responsibility of the author to moralize if they don't desire to, it's not my job to evaluate narratives solely through empathy, biologically unreliable as that method is. Still, I made some worthwhile observations regarding the refreshingly few and brief appearances of Communism and the culminating resolution of the protagonist in the previously cited fairy tale-esque structure of enchanted items, a parent's blessing, and a modern, loyal form of Prince Charming. All worthy of an essay or two, but this is not the most entertaining form of reading engagement, or the most energy efficient, so I will have to let Guo's works rest for the moment.

Another reading day, another not as great read, but considering how well the previous two works I read went, I can't bemoan too much. There's no telling what Guo would have made of 280 or 550 pages, which were the relative lengths of those last two aforementioned works, and there's some telling what her chances of publications would have been, a woman of color in translation to Anglo, if she had chosen to wax verbose in this work, her first novel to be published outside of China. The bias towards the horrendously short in length is obvious in my shelves for works hailing from that particular demographic, and it makes me wonder how much I have been cheated of in terms of appreciating a writer when so few are allowed to break into the 400+ page realm and beyond, leastwise in the realm of fiction. In any case, I'll pick up another Guo that seems written more in the vein of TFoaRY than anything else, as I still appreciate the keen view she has of my age group, and in these climate changed ends of eras, I'll take what commiseration I can get.